


Prologue: The Polyphony of the Spheres

by TunnelRabbit



Series: Orbits [1]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Astronomy, Cultural Differences, Gen, Original Mythology, Post-Canon, the universe - Freeform, worldviews
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-10
Updated: 2017-03-10
Packaged: 2018-09-30 21:43:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10172966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TunnelRabbit/pseuds/TunnelRabbit
Summary: The Gaang on a rooftop, stargazing and contemplating the universe. Which they each understand a little differently.Ba Sing Se, two months after the comet and the coronation.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This happens in the middle of Chapter 3 of [Book 4: Harmony](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10173911/chapters/22598069), in the midst of the first post-war treaty negotiations at the Earth King's palace. Book 4 begins during the last episode of A:tLa, in the middle of Zuko's coronation.
> 
> But this story works just fine as a standalone. No spoilers.

“I miss Space Sword.”

Toph reached over and squeezed Sokka’s hand.

Sokka stared up at the evening sky. “I wonder where it came from.”

Toph lay flat on the rooftop, hands behind her head, as if she were stargazing. Sokka actually was stargazing, resting his mind after a day (weeks) of more politics than he’d ever wanted to think about. Suki sat cross-legged at Sokka’s other side, idly tracing the patterns on the ceramic floor tiles with her fingertip. You wouldn’t want to be up here on a rainy day, she thought, and craned her neck a bit to check how long the drop would be if you slipped.

Nearby, Aang and Katara looked out over the railing towards the Eastern Sea, already invisible in the deepening dusk. Aang was quietly telling stories of the constellations to Katara, leaning in close to point them out in her line of sight, linking the tiny stars into obscure patterns. Zuko faced the other way, leaning back on the railing next to Katara and watching the last light of the setting sun and the mountains in dark relief before it, looking to the Fire Nation.

It had been a long day of treaty negotiations and they had retreated to this observation deck on top of the Earth King’s Palace. They were exhausted, but contemplating the universe together felt somehow more restorative than simply going to bed.

“I thought you said you made it from a meteor,” said Suki.

“Yeah, but where did the meteor come from? One night when we were in the Fire Nation, it fell screaming out of the sky, this flaming ball of metal and rock. It was only about the size of an armadillo lion, but came in with so much force that it made a crater as big as King Kuei's throne room. Was it a piece of a planet? A star?”

“I wonder if a meteor is the same thing as a comet?” Suki looked up pensively.

“Wouldn’t it be ironic if that meteor was a little piece of Sozin’s Comet?” said Katara.

“It’s not Sozin’s Comet any more. We’re going back to its original name: the Comet of Surya. We can’t allow our people to glorify genocide any longer.”

“Ditch the crown, Zuko.” Toph pointed straight at him without raising her head. “You’re off duty now. We’ve had enough for one day.”

“If Sozin’s Comet—sorry, _Surya's_ Comet—is made of the same stuff as Space Sword, then how does it fly through the sky?” Sokka wondered. “Why doesn’t gravity pull it down to earth, same as the meteor?”

“The comet is made of fire,” said Zuko. “Obviously.”

“No, it’s not. It _is_ something similar to the meteor. Rock or metal. It was so powerful I could feel its pull, even up in the sky,” said Toph.

“Anyway, gravity’s not all that.” Aang spun around to face them and hopped up onto the railing in one graceful motion, balancing there in the lotus position.

“Says the airbender.”

“It’s got a little play in it, Sokka, just like every other force in the universe. You can evade it, twist it, work it to your advantage.”

“ _You_ can maybe. Sounds like an airbender fantasy to me,” Toph scoffed. “Earthbenders know that gravity is the power that holds the entire universe together, the first law of the universe, the foundation everything is built on. It’s gravity that makes the Earth a planet—otherwise, it would just be a cloud of dust. It spins the Earth and keeps all the planets in their orbits.”

Sokka turned to Toph, impressed. “Who knew you were such a philosopher!”

“It’s called an education, Sokka. Maybe I can’t read, but I still had to spend hours every day with a tutor droning on at me. Something had to stick.”

“Be grateful you got that.” Katara turned on Toph. “I only got to my scrolls and brushes by lamplight after all the work was done. There certainly wasn’t time for the finer points of astronomy. I would’ve given a lot for an actual tutor, growing up. Or a bending master.”

Zuko shuffled his feet uncomfortably, with a sidelong glance at Katara. “Your brushwork is beautiful,” he mumbled.

“But waterbenders know all about the moon, right?” said Aang, giving Katara an encouraging little elbow bump. “And that has to do with gravity and orbits and all that.”

“I suppose so,” Katara paused to remember. “The women told stories while we worked. Some of them were just fanciful, like the one where Tui is a hunter with his harpoon and his net and he pursues La the ocean, a woman, who pulls him on until he’s spent and starved and falls back to nothing, and then it starts over again. He can never catch her, of course. That would be impossible.”

“Well, we actually _saw_ a man kill the moon, and a woman take its place, so I don’t know. Pretty much anything’s possible,” Aang said.

“How could you catch the ocean in a net, anyway?” Toph propped herself up on an elbow, skeptical but interested despite herself.

“Ok, fine, it was a watertight basket or something. But whether the moon is a spirit, or a planet, or just some hunk of rock, we know that it really does push and pull the ocean, and that’s what makes the tides. As he—I guess it's 'she' now—as she goes around the Earth, waxing and waning, farther and nearer, and as she changes, she pulls and releases the ocean. There used to be waterbenders whose job it was to track the moon each day to predict the exactly what kind of tides we would have. Some say they could even tell the future.”

“So what about the firebenders?” Sokka sat up to look at Zuko. “You’ve had more education than any of us. What do you know?”

“Right, plenty of education," Zuko agreed bitterly. "We did nothing but train and study and memorize things. What I was _taught_ was that the sun is the original fire at the center of the universe and everything orbits around it.”

“That sounds firebendey, all right.”

“But now I’m doubting everything I ever learned. So much of it was complete rhino shit to justify the war—how do I know which lessons I can trust? Even the myths were changed.”

“Sozin went so far as to change the Fire Nation’s sacred myths?”

“They told the Fire Sages to stop honoring the Avatar, didn’t they, Katara? What’s more sacred than that? So, yeah, I did a little research on the comet before renaming it. The story we heard as children was that the Earth and the Moon banded together to break away from the sun’s power, riding the winds of Heaven, but when Surya the sun learned of this, he became so angry he hurled a piece of his own flame at them to stop them.”

Sokka snorted. “Right. ‘Cause _that’s_ not metaphor for anything.”

“But apparently, the original story before Sozin’s time was that one of Surya’s sons defied him—he suggested that the stars were his father’s equal—and so angered Surya that he banished his son to seek out a new home among the stars. His son tried, but could never stop thinking of his old home and every hundred years he returns and begs to be taken back.”

“You sure you didn’t come up with that one yourself, Fire Lord?” Toph muttered under her breath.

“Well, the stars _are_ the equal of the sun, aren’t they?” said Sokka.

“Of course not. They orbit the sun like the planets and everything else. The life energy radiating from the sun gets weaker the farther out you get, which is why the stars are so dim.”

“Logically, if they’re that far away, they might not be so tiny,” Sokka argued. “And they don’t move in the same rhythms as the planets. The stars and planets move steadily together through the hours. But the stars shift gradually over the year, as one, while the planets ebb and flow, back and forth over the months, each one on its own course. That’s how we learn to navigate in the Water Tribes. Currents in the ocean, currents in the sky. They have patterns you can follow.”

“So then, for you, the planets are separate from the stars, like, I don’t know, boats floating in some heavenly sea of distant suns?”

“Sure, that sounds about right. Very poetic, Aang. What about the airbenders? What did they believe?”

“The Air Nomads believe the universe has no center. Bodies orbit each other in complex patterns that are always shifting, in a grand cosmic dance beyond our understanding.”

“Woh.” Toph rolled back, spread-eagled on the tiles, staring sightlessly at the heavens.

“That makes no sense, Aang,” Zuko objected. “The sun is clearly the most powerful thing in the sky.”

“Sure, to us. The Earth is definitely orbiting the sun. But maybe someday it won’t be. It’s all relative, and to people up there”—Aang picked out a star over his head and pointed—“the sun is insignificant. They’re orbiting something else. And maybe our sun itself is orbiting something else, too. And on and on into infinity.”

A silence settled over the group as they absorbed this idea, feeling very small.

Sokka flattened himself on the floor again. “Ok. Mind blown.” 

“How can we all see it so differently? Do we even live in the same universe?” Suki shook her head.

“Of course we do,” said Katara, warm and reassuring. “We know when the sun will rise and set, when the moon will wax and wane, how the constellations will turn, when the comet will burn again. We know the orbits and cycles of all the lights in the sky, and that everything they do, they will do again. The rest is just details.”

“And we live in the human world," Aang added. "Gravity may govern the heavenly bodies, but for us earthly bodies, it all comes down to love. Either way, nothing is lost, and everything returns.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> This launches several "books" covering the lives and loves of our Gaang, to the bitter/sweet end, in theory. (In reality, there is my life, but I'll do my best.) 
> 
> (BTW, the title of the prologue is a play on "The Harmony of the Spheres," a Pythagorean philosophical theory that the mathematical proportions of the orbits of the planets and such were analogous to the proportions between musical intervals, and that therefore the movement of the celestial bodies was a form of music. For what it's worth.)


End file.
